You know we are approaching some sort of climax when reporting goes full stupid.

As a U.S.-backed effort to overthrow Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro continues,U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said late Wednesday that Hezbollah “has active cells” in Venezuela—a claim that was immediately scrutinized and compared with the second Bush administration’s lies to justify the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

Hezbollah, a political and militant Shi’ite Muslim group based in Lebanon, has been on the U.S. State Department’s “Designated Foreign Terrorist Organizations” list since 1997. In the interview with Fox Business, Pompeo, who previously served as President Donald Trump’s CIA director, also charged that Iran and Cuba are strongly influencing the country.

“The Cubans invaded Venezuela. The Cubans have been controlling the security apparatus, protecting Maduro, and destroying the way of life for the Venezuelan people for an awfully long time,” he said. “People don’t recognize that Hezbollah has active cells—the Iranians are impacting the people of Venezuela and throughout South America. We have an obligation to take down that risk for America.”

.@SecPompeo confirms to me exclusively that #Hezbollah is active in #venezuela - WATCH: pic.twitter.com/kQm37SIhep

— Trish Regan (@trish_regan) February 7, 2019

So, #Lebanon's population is 4 million, only a fraction of whom are Shia, less than half of whom are male, only a fraction of whom are Hezbollah members, only a fraction of whom are military age...Yet #Hezbollah apparently has a NATO-sized armed force that operates globally. Lol. https://t.co/Hm0jeBZm0S

— Sharmine Narwani (@snarwani) February 7, 2019

You don't have to be that old to remember this same bullshit from the 2002 invasion of Iraq.

They can say a lie and act on it even if nobody actually believes it. https://t.co/6GIYSfgEcj

— Boots Riley (@BootsRiley) February 7, 2019

Let's not forget the story of Maduro blocking aid coming over that bridge to his starving people.

Despite dozens of media outlets giving the impression (and sometimes explicitly saying) that the Venezuelan government shut down an otherwise functioning pathway into the country, the bridge in question hasn’t been open for years.

It’s true the Venezuelan government appears to have placed an oil tanker and cargo containers on the bridge to prevent incursion from the Colombian side, but the other barriers, as writer and software developer Jason Emery noted, have been in place since at least 2016. According to La Opinion (2/5/16), after its initial construction in 2015, the bridge has never been open to traffic. How can Maduro, as the BBC suggested, “reopen” a bridge that was never open?

The reality is BBC and other Western media were just going along with the narrative pushed by Sen. Marco Rubio and Trump Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, not bothering to check if their primary visual narrative was based on a bad faith, context-free PR stunt.